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Oklahoma shark tales always come with teeth

JENKS — Twenty sharks weave through the water. Some are 9 feet long and weigh 300 pounds. They have an endless supply of teeth on a conveyor belt of sorts. We’re talking 30,000 teeth in their lifetime.

Above: Sharks circle over people in a clear tunnel during feeding time at the Oklahoma Aquarium in Jenks.

I wanted to tell you that to explain why I gave Christa Clawson, assistant curator at the Oklahoma Aquarium, one of those "Are you absolutely out of your mind?” looks. I know that’s not good business on my part, but let me share what she said.

Standing at the base of the 465,000-gallon shark tank, she nonchalantly looked at me and said, "I love diving with them. It’s a very calming effect, how agile they are. Everybody has always heard how dangerous they are, but when you’re in that tank with them, sometimes just sitting there watching, they’re just very, very graceful and that always still just amazes me.”

She kept talking, which was good, because I was speechless — which is about as rare as a day in Oklahoma without wind.

"You kind of learn their mannerisms and know when it’s time to get out,” she said. "You know when to stay out of their way. Just like any other animal, it’s their space and they’ll let you know when you don’t belong there any more. We try to go in once a week to clean the floors, and either two or three of us get in.”

Seeing the look on my face, she must have been trying to reassure me when she said they wear chain-mail suits to protect them against shark bites.

"The main purpose of it is that if for some reason we did get bit, they couldn’t take a limb and rip it off,” she said. "They could crush you, but they couldn’t get through that chain mail to your skin.”

Well heck, why didn’t you say so in the first place? That makes me feel a lot more at ease.

She said she has never been bitten.

"For the most part, they stay away from you,” she said. "If they start getting agitated, they may start getting closer to you, but you can usually tell by how they’re swimming, and it lets you know that they don’t want you there anymore.

"For the most part they just leave you alone.”

I wanted to talk with Clawson, an employee at the aquarium for about eight years, because I knew she helps feed the sharks.

I had no idea that instead of listening to jazz or reading a good book, she relaxes by diving into a tank of sharks.

What I found was that staff and volunteers are about as nervous feeding the sharks as I would be feeding guppies and goldfish. They know what they’re doing. And after years and years, they know who they’re feeding.

Let me be clear: They don’t get in the tank and serve up the bonito and salmon twice a week.

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Bryan Painter, assistant local editor, has 31 years’ experience in journalism, including 22 years with the state's largest newspaper, The Oklahoman. In that time he has covered such events as the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah...